Overriding BIOS limited CPU speed while running on battery

The Wrath of Dell

As it turns out, my work at salvaging a power adapter for my Dell Inspiron 6000 was not as much of a smashing success as I had initially thought.  I noticed that the battery charging tray indicator wasn't going away.  This happened sometimes, and required me to unplug the cord a few times.  However, I had duct taped the cord in place to prevent it from falling out, and didn't care to fix it.

Eventually I noticed that the power level was only going down.  I also noticed that I had suddenly lost the ability to watch .mp4, or just about any video over 480p.  The internet seemed even slower than usual, and I started noticing my cronjobs running even with their low nice levels.

I had a suspicion, but didn't want to look into it for fear of confirmation.  I eventually caved and discovered my battery was not charging.  The BIOS listed the AC adapter as an unknown device, and thus refused to charge.

I deduced that when I shorted the unknown-at-the-time third wire to the +19.5V wire I must have fried the chip on the motherboard that looked for other Dell products.

Further research confirmed my deepest fear: In addition to refusing to charge the battery, Dell forced the laptop to run at half speed if it didn't detect a Dell adapter.  I could certainly live with the battery not charging, as my laptop had long ago become a desktop, but an 800 MHz CPU was pushing it.


The Search for a Fix

I began looking for a hacked BIOS to undo all the Dell nonsense with renewed gusto.  Unfortunately, while it seemed possible, it didn't seem anyone had published anything.  I briefly considered hacking the BIOS myself, as my previous BIOS messing withs have gone well.

Eventually, I discovered that while the battery charging was controlled by the BIOS, the CPU speed was controlled by the OS, with the BIOS only able to suggest speeds.

I learned of CPU governors which were profiles that controlled the speed.  By running the command cpufreq-info I found my current governor was ondemand, and I had the common performance governor available.  I could update the governor with:
sudo echo performance > /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_governor

I confirmed this with cpufreq-info, but it also showed my speed still at 800MHz.  The policy said that the speed had to be between 800MHz and 800MHz and that the governor could decide which speed to use between those limits.  This made me suspect that perhaps the BIOS had more control over the speed than I had hoped.  Still, I persevered as it seemed other Dell users had fixed this, although they were being coy about exactly how.


The Voyage to 1.6 GHz

The breakthrough came from this site and its comments, which revealed there was a seperate BIOS limit that I was missing.

For me, the key file was at: /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/bios_limit  You can edit this file similar to the above command, but I recommend opening it with a text editor to see its current setting.  For me, it was at 800000, and needed to be changed to 1600000, evidently in KHz.

This is all well and good, but it will be overwritten by the BIOS on each boot.  To prevent that you can edit your GRUB file at: /etc/default/grub to contain this magic line: GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="processor.ignore_ppc=1"  Follow that by running update-grub to, as the name implies, update grub, and reboot.

Now, cpufreq-info revealed that the policy could pick speeds from 800MHz to 1.6GHz, and what's more it was picking 1.6GHz.  I left the governor at ondemand since it was successfully raising the speed as needed.

PS
On a page full of technical Linux commands I found the most recent comment good:
"You all sound mega tech savvy so this might be a stupid answer but i fixed mine by blowing down the end of the cable….."